Resources

Associations

Creative Commons

assistant professor at the IIT's Shailesh J. Mehta School of
Management, said the [Creative Commons] project would focus
on three specific areas in India. These are -- centres of
higher education like the seven IITs, regional technology
institutes and management and other institutions. "These are
increasingly taking recourse to creating video and web-based
courses such as the National Programme for Technology
Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) and distance education courses such
as C-DEEP and eGURU. And all would benefit from keeping
content sharable," Jha told IANS. Creative Commons-India also
plans to focus on non-profit and non-governmental
organisations and corporates keen on adopting easier-to-share
licences for the dissemination of their documents. Jha said
that there were many independent creative artistes working
with film, documentary, music and text who would like to
explore the possibilities of reaching out to a wider audience
with the use of Creative Commons licences."
(http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/datamanagement/stories/168653.html)

Other

Freedom in Technology and Software, http://www.freed.in, promotes freedom in technology, software and other related fields, such as personal privacy

Events

CREATIVE COMMONS INDIA SHORT FILM CONTEST: On the occasion of
the 60th anniversary of India's independence, Creative
Commons India organised a short film contest, on 'Better
governance through Right To Information'.
http://cc-india.org/index.php?q=node/27

Home - FOSS.IN/2007
One of the world's largest FOSS events, held annually
in India. The event is highly focussed on FOSS development
and contribution.
http://foss.in/

shapes culture and it is a professional activity
that is beneficial for both community and business
alike. This blog is for all those who are
interested in exploring these wider manifestations
of design as a critical human activity and would
like to shape its application across all human
cultural and economic activities. India needs
design today across all 230 sectors of our economy.

This blog is a space to explore and articulate some
of the issues and perspectives that can contribute
to a better understanding of these opportunities.
This blog is managed by Prof. M P Ranjan, NID,
Ahmedabad. You are invited to also look at the
design education blog called "Design Concepts and
Concerns" here for a contemporaneous documentation
of the DCC courses at the NID, Ahmedabad.
http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/

Bytes for All

BytesForAll mailing list [4] Sharing ideas and information of how ICT (information and communication technology) can be deployed for a pro-people purpose.

Traditional Knowledge

Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) Director Dr. V.
K. Gupta said at the conference: "TKDL deals with traditional
knowledge and the issue of patents. We're not focused on
getting patents, but on preventing its misappropriation."
"Knowledge from the fields of [Indian systems of medicine
like] Ayurveda or Siddha are very well documented. But the
problem is that of language. This knowledge is documented in
languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, or Persian. Books
about them are not available at international patent offices.
So, there's no understanding [about how ancient this
knowledge really is]," said Gupta. Gupta pointed out that if
anything is pre-known, then existing intellectual property
rights (IPR) laws do not allow it to be patented. "A majority
of the patents [taken on Indian knowledge] is by expatriate
Indians or multinational corporations. There are about 2,000
patents which have been wrongly issued, in our view. Each
takes 11 years to fight. How do you resolve this problem?" he asked. So TKDL's approach is to document traditional
knowledge. We've done it for around 70,000 formulations in
Ayurveda, and some more in the Unani and Siddha," he added.
TKD's team of a hundred persons have been working on this for
the past five years. http://tkdl.res.in/

Open Access Initiatives in Science and Medicine

Summary by Subbiah Arunachalam:

ON OPEN ACCESS: Subbiah (Arun) Arunachalam
[email protected] is one of the most prominent
campaigners for Open Access in India.

He outlines the strengths, for journals: Many leading
journals published in India are already open access. These
include the journals published by the Indian Academy of
Sciences [8], the Indian National Science
Academy [9], Indian Council of Medical
Research [10] and the Calicut Medical
College [11]. Besides, both National
Informatics Centre [12] and MedKnow
[13] publish open access journals on
behalf of about 75 societies.

Says he: "Thus India publishes about 100 OA journals.
Actually these are hybrid journals (print + electronic, with
the print version sold against a subscription). No Indian
journal charges a fee from the authors for publishing papers.
MedKnow [14] model is win-win all the
way."

At the level of repositories: About thirty institutions have
set up their own interoperable institutional open access
repositories using open source software such as EPrints
[15] and DSpace
[16]. Indian Institute of Science
[17] was the first to set up and the
IISc EPrints archive [18] has over
8000 records. NIT Rourkela [19] is the
only Indian institution to have mandated open access for all
faculty and student research publications.

At the level of course ware: The NPTEL programme (National
Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning,
http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/), jointly mounted by IITs and IISc
is a world class open course ware programme. IIT and IISc
faculty prepare the course material and these are recorded in
real life teaching situations for transmission over the web
or as a video film or as both.

The National Knowledge Commission
[20] has recommended mandating
open access to all publicly funded research and the
recommendation is now with the Prime Minister. The topic was
discussed both in the Libraries Working Group and in the Open
and Distance Education Working Group of NKC
[21]

Says Arunachalam: "Before laying down office of President,
INSA (Indian National Science Academy
http://www.insaindia.org), Dr R A Mashelkar, invited me to
address the Council of INSA on the pros and cons of open
access. My presentation was circulated to all Fellows of
INSA, but I am yet to hear from INSA about their plan of
action. Indian Academy of Sciences is planning to place all
papers by all Fellows, past and present, on an open access
archive."

But, he concedes, they are going about it rather slowly. A
number of workshops have been held on topics such as open
access, EPrints, DSpace, Digital Libraries, Open Course Ware,
etc. DSIR (Govt. of India's Department for Scientific &
Industrial Research. http://www.dsir.nic.in) has supported
some research and advocacy at IISc-NCSI.

Engineers India Org: Engineer Portal

India's own Engineer Portal for engineers. Come write for us
and get involved in the most ambitious online project ever in
India!
We will pay a token amount, though not much, but your
involvement is appreciated. The articles of this weblog are
licensed under a Creative Commons license.
http://engineersindia.org/

Environment

Medicine

in 2005 and since then they have over 1100 registered members
and it is being used by medical professionals to archive
their publications. It claims to be the only archive in the
world in the area of medical/biomedical sciences and the only
one that uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for keywords.
The Indian Journal of Tuberculosis is available from December
1953 and again this is the first archive that has
publications from 1952! Says those involved with the archive,
"Please feel free to browse through the contents and add your
publications in the archive to enable access to health
information to all." Source: Naina Pandita, National
Informatics Centre, New Delhi Email: [email protected]
Received via: [email protected]

MEDKNOW: Medknow Publications calls itself "the largest

publisher in India for academic and scientific biomedical
journals." It says it is a publishing house committed to the
improving the visibility and accessibility of the science
from the developing world. Medknow also says it "pioneers in
'fee-less-free' model of open access publishing and provides
immediate free access to the electronic editions of the
journals without charging the author or author's institution
for submission, processing or publication of the articles."
Currently Medknow, with over 40 print + online journals, is
"probably the largest open access publisher of print journals
in the world which does not charge author or author
institution for submission, processing or publication of
articles." Each journal published by Medknow has its
independent website. The websites use the OpenURL standard,
making it easy for libraries to link users as directly as
possible from citation to the full text of the article. The
open access policy has resulted in more than a half a million
article downloads in a month all the journals, according to
Medknow. Medknow has successfully put in place an original
electronic manuscript submission and peer review system
[23] for the first time in India.
This system has been in use since 2001 by authors and peers
across the globe and over 15,000 manuscripts have been
processed through it. Eliminating use of postal or hard copy
submissions, this online submission and processing of
articles has resulted in considerable decrease in the
submission to decision (turnaround) time. Most of the
journals published by Medknow are archived at multiple places
included OAI-compliant e-print repositories
[24] and sites such as Bioline
International [25], thus, ensuring the
long term archiving and accessibility of the published
content. http://www.medknow.com/

Indian Journals.com says at

[26]
that it currently have five open access journals: * Anil
Aggrawal's Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and
Toxicology (Professor Anil Aggrawal) B) Fire Engineer
(Institution of Fire Engineers (India)) * Journal of
Neonatology (National Neonatology Forum) * Journal of
Research, SKUAST-J (Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural
Sciences and Technology-Jammu) and * The Journal of Bombay
Veterinary College (Bombay Veterinary College Alumni
Association). There is also a sixth journal freely available
from indianjournals.com today. The publishers have yet to
decide definitively how they would like to proceed in the
longer term, but currently their intention is to keep it
under open access. The journal in question is * Indian
Journal of Medical and Paediatric Oncology (Indian Society of
Medical and Paediatric Oncology).

Sukhdev Singh says: "Many of the Indian journals provide Free

Access to their online content. We also provide free access
to 38 Indian Biomedical Journals - http://medind.nic.in
However most of them do not differenciate between Free Access
and Open Access. According to various definitions - Open
Access goes beyond Free Access by also granting "distribution
rights" to the end user. Those who understand the difference
make it clear that they are Free Access only. Take for
example -- "Open access: To be or not to be"? an Editorial in
Indian Journal of Pharmacology - "IJP will continue to be a
Free Access journal and insist on copyright transfer. Readers
may make a few copies of any article for personal use and
distribute a limited number of copies for non-profit,
non-promotional academic activities (such as workshop or
lectures) without prior permission."
http://medind.nic.in/ibi/t05/i3/ibit05i3p139.pdf

The Jan Swasthya Abhiyan is the Indian circle of the
People's Health Movement, a worldwide movement to establish
health and equitable development as top priorities through
comprehensive primary health care and action on the social
determinants of health.

The Jan Swasthya Abhiyan coalition consists of over 20
networks and 1000 organisations as well as a large number of
individuals that endorse the Indian People's Health Charter a
consensus document that arose out of the Jan Swasthya Sabha
held in December 2000 when concerned networks, organisations
and individuals met to discuss the Health for All Challenge.
This site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
2.5 License.
http://phm-india.org/

enable locals to make more detailed maps of their
area. After the data has been uploaded and then
verified against other participant's data it
becomes a part of the map. The process is very
reminiscent of what Open Street Map, the community
map-building project, has been doing. The biggest
difference is that the data (to my knowledge) is
owned by Google and is not freely available back to
the community like it is with OSM."

Technology

Free Software and Open Source: General

Skoch Consultancy Services has recently published the first knowledge repository of Open Source Technologies in India, this lists over 50 such applications covering most of the areas mentioned by you and more. This is currently available as a hard copy publication only. Skoch Development Foundation can send a few to some of the interested members of the community on a complimentary basis. The interested members may email us with complete contact details and mailing address at [email protected]

FOSS: Specific projects

This is a GNU/Linux operating system consisting entirely of Free/Open Source Software. It has been developed with the vision to enhance the use of Free/Open Source Software in the country. Made specifically for the Indian environment, it consists of a pleasing Desktop environment coupled with Indian language support and other packages that are most relevant for use in the government domain. Subsequent versions will support the educational domain as well. It is an initiative of CDAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing), a scientific society of Ministry of Communication and Information Technology

SELF Platformhttp://beta.selfplatform.eu (gnowledge lab of HBCSE, TIFR is a collaborator and the collaborative authoring system is developed by the gnowledge lab. ) This application is not an LMS, but meant for authoring SCORM complaint courses. Also see http://courses.gnowledge.org/SELF/ a fresh instance which is waiting for the community to build free courses.

GNOWSYS, Gnowledge Networking and Organizing system. This is the heart of the SELF Platform mentioned above, also developed by the gnowledge lab of HBCSE, TIFR. GNOWSYS is an official GNU project, http://www.gnu.org/software/gnowsys/

Local Information

Discussion

India At The Forefront Of Knowledge Commons Debate

[3 September 2006] By Frederick Noronha for Intellectual
Property Watch: NEW DELHI - What do seeds have in common with
software? Or age-old medicines with copyright lawyers? And,
what's the link between ayurvedic medicines and techies
talking free software in Bangalore? Such issues are getting
closely enmeshed in a deepening debate on how knowledge is
shared or controlled in this new information-dominated
century. This is a debate of vital relevance for a country
that is making an increasingly visible global impact through
its brain power, and yet has among the most impressive
collections of traditional medicines and knowledge. Diverse
views surface on how such issues should be tackled, as was
strongly obvious at a 24-25 August 'knowledge symposiu' held
at New Delhi. The invite-only meet was organised by the open
source software firm Red Hat (India) and the Indian Institute
of Technology New Delhi. The event brought these diverse
strands together while focusing on what it said were
alternative ways of looking at sharing knowledge and concepts
like intellectual property. India has big stakes in this
debate. It is home to vast amounts of traditional knowledge -
traditional systems of medicine and healthcare, like Yoga,
Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha (both systems of medicine),
traditional agriculture, and more. But the planet's
second-most populous country also faces the dilemma of
getting global acceptability on intellectual property issues
as it integrates growingly with the global economy.
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=389